If your designer certification were suddenly rendered invalid, would you feel any less professional? Would you feel any less knowledgeable about your craft?

Those questions are at the root of an ongoing debate between IPC and the Designer’s Council Executive Board. The two parties have been at odds over the past several months due to a difference in opinion over the nature of the certification program.

Designer certification as a formality dates back to 1994. A group of industry professionals, along with the late Dieter Bergman, then IPC technical director, devised the original template. (Disclosure: I was the IPC staff liaison for design and was present at all the meetings where the program was drafted.) A consulting firm we’d hired advised us to use a consensus body of knowledge such as a standard as the foundation for the exam, as it would leave us less exposed to litigation from someone who might have failed the test. Thus, we wrote hundreds of questions for a test based on IPC-D-275, the prevailing design standard of the time, but steeped in good design practice. And we developed a multi-day workshop to prepare designers for it.

With every Apex comes an outpouring of new standards, and this year’s conference was no exception.

As the demands of PCBs for automotive applications assert themselves as a unique class, the industry standards are being adapted in sync. To that end, IPC-6012, the longstanding bare board qualification spec, now has an automotive supplement, reflecting the “superclass” of reliability for that sector above and beyond Class 2.

Given that auto electronics are shrinking, the IPC task group has eliminated visual inspection in favor of AOI on all layers and recommends use of AVI (automated visual inspection) of the finished PCB.

The cleanliness testing requirement has also been rewritten. The automotive addendum includes a recommendation of tests to be used in Production Part Approval Process (PPAP) documentation.